Ten Thousand Hours

Practice makes perfect right? That’s what we are told when we are young and even when we get older to motivate us to work to improve, but is practice really the key to success? Malcolm Gladwell makes an argument on page 40 of his book, Outliers that, “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class-expert--- in anything.” There are several people who disagree with his thinking. Although I agree with Gladwell partially that lots of practice can lead to mastery of skills, I don’t agree with his thoughts that 10,000 hours makes you a world class expert in “anything” because of articles I have read and my own personal experiences. After
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” Gladwell clearly says that in order to achieve “true expertise” one must spend ten thousand hours practicing their specific skill. He then backs up his arguments with several examples such as, Bill Joy spending over ten thousand hours working with computers, the Beatles spending over ten thousand hours practicing their stage performances in Germany, and even Mozart spending over ten thousand hours practicing and writing music. These are all true examples of how ten thousand hours of practice helped these people become experts in their specific field. This rule even appears true today especially in professional sports. Currently the two best and most well known professional soccer players in the world are Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Everyone in touch with the soccer world knows they are the greatest of their time, but how long did they practice to get where they are today? According to www.Ronaldo7.net, “Ronaldo practices around 5 times per week. On average he trains around 3-4 hours per day.” Using this information we can calculate how many hours total Ronaldo has spent practicing throughout his life. He spends 15-20 hours a week practicing, there are 52 weeks in a year, and he has been
Lots of people disagree with Gladwell about this last part of his statement because they believe that even with an extreme amount of practice you are not guaranteed to become an expert in certain fields. Drake Baer, who is a writer for businessinsider.com says, “But a new Princeton study tears that theory down. In a meta-analysis of 88 studies on deliberate practice, the researchers found that practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains.” Baer also says, “Johansson argues that deliberate practice is only a predictor of success in fields that have super stable structures. For example, in tennis, chess, and classical music, the rules never change, so you can study up to become the best. But in less stable fields, like entrepreneurship and rock and roll, rules can go out the window.” In the first statement Baer uses a Princeton study to show that practice only accounted for an overall difference in performance of just 12% in several different fields. So yes practice does help, but it does not make as big of a difference as Gladwell says it does in his book Outliers. In the second statement Baer is saying that practice is more important in fields with “Stable Structures” where nothing ever changes and so people are capable of mastering skills because the skills and knowledge needed never change